Brand queries as a ranking signal?
-
Hi folks,
I may be shooting WAY off the mark here for it to be laughable, but I wondered if anyone else was thinking about this.
I was trying to get to sleep last night, but was thinking about rankings (as you do... You DO think about rankings instead of counting sheep don't you... I'm not weird or anything am I... AM I?) and it occurred to me that maybe Google uses frequency of brand queries as a ranking signal - was wondering if anyone had done any research into this?
Assuming that if more people are searching for a brand name, then there must be an outside influence on this behaviour (offline ads or editorial for example) - and this all points to a site or company being popular or interesting - maybe Google looks at the growth in brand name queries, and boosts based on this...
I have done no research into this (I was just thinking about it instead of counting sheep last night... because I probably AM weird...) but was wondering what people here thought of this.
Also, I don't have time (or intelligence TBH) to run an experiment on this, but maybe one of you bright sparks would?
Best wishes,
Amelia
PS - if I'm being STOOPID please be gentle with me
-
I thought pagerank algorithm was largely redundant these days? But good points, thank you!
Yes, I am very interested in universal search.
-
I feel this would detract from Google's entire PageRank algorithm, if they were to base popularity off search query data. Although this would be really hard to test because as the popularity of the brand query grows so will other factors like links and anchor text. It would be really hard to tell what is affecting what.
A related study was done on the impact of brand mentions: http://moz.com/blog/panda-patent-brand-mentions ...But these are not tied to brand query data alone.
Where you might find some interesting insights is how universal search is affected by query popularity. I.e. the influence of news results or in-depth articles as a particular query grows in interest.
-
Phew... I'm not weird!!!
Thanks for your comment, you raise a good point about bad user experience. I'm looking at stuff to improve ours, but tbh it's not that bad... I need to look at our longtail landing pages in better detail, but our main core pages have low bounce rates which I take as being a positive thing.
I used to work for a company that had a subsidiary company that did online videos, the premise for selling the videos to SEO clients was that if people watch a video then bounce rate goes down and dwell time goes up, which is a good thing for rankings... Been thinking about this as an option, but it's expensive to get GOOD videos. (I don't mean over-priced, I mean out of my price range).
Amelia
-
first of all I am glad I am not the only person who thinks about this before sleep (its when I come up with my crazy ideas and thoughts) - tip, have a notebook next to you otherwise you might forget by the morning.
I've never seen any direct correlation between this and I would guess it would be very hard to prove either way, but I would tend to agree.
Google wants to rank sites which are more popular and answer their users experience, so if a lot of people are searching for 'x' and search term. I.e. 'bbc televisions' and someone else did a search for televisions, I wouldn't be surprised to see bbc ranking higher as a lot of people had suddenly been searching for the site. The only caveat I would add would be, that if your site has a poor user experience and a lot of people search brand name an query and bounce, you would probably rank lower.
I have never seen any evidence for this, however its not a silly question / thought.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Why does my old brand name still show up on organic search but as my new brand name and domain?
Hello mozers! I have quite the conundrum. My client used to have the unfortunate brand name "Meetoo" - which by the way they had before the movement happened! So naturally, they rebranded to the name Vevox in March 2019 to avoid confusion to users. However, when you search for their old brand name "Meetoo" the first organic link that pops up is their domain www.vevox.com. Now, this wouldn't normally be a problem, however it is when any #MeToo news appears in the media and we get a sudden influx or wrong traffic. I've searched the HTML and content for the term "Meetoo" but can only find one trace of this name through a widget. Not enough to hold an organic spot. My only other thinking is that www.vevox.com is redirected from www.meetoo.com. So I'm assuming this is why Vevox appear under the search term "Meetoo". How can I remove the homepage www.vevox.com from appearing for the search term "meetoo"? Can anyone help? AvGGYBc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Virginia-Girtz3 -
Is my website is having enough content on it to rank?
I have less content on my website, is this okay or I need to add more content on my pages? Website is - brandstenmedia.com.au Any other suggestions for the website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Green.landon0 -
Why isnt this site ranking?
I just took over for a site and noticed they have no presence for any keywords...not even low ranks. Their backlink profile is not the best, but webmaster tools says they have no manual actions. vonderhaar.com Thoughts on the matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Can changing G+ authorship on a well-ranking article drop its search ranking?
We have an article that ranks #1 in Google SERP for the keyword we want it to rank for. We decided to revise the article because although it's performing well, we knew it could be better and more informative for the user. Now that we've revised the content, we're wondering: Should we update the article author (and the G+ authorship markup) to reflect that the revisor authored the content, or keep the original author listed? Can changing G+ authorship on an article impact its search ranking, or is that an issue that's a few Google algorithm updates down the road?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pasware0 -
Is it worth buying a GREAT domain with rank?
Hey Guys, I am in communication with the owner of a domain with very good domain rank - that ranks well for keywords important to me. Strangely enough the website it terrible?! (I though Google valued "content" these days?!). Anyhow, it's link profile is tidy including sites such as DMOZ. His asking price for the domain is SUBSTANTIAL, however where it ranks for some keywords would be valuable for our organisation if we could leverage its authority. My questions are: 1) Is it worth buys a GREAT domain with a crappy website that ranks for keywords that are important to us? 2) (if the answer to 1 is YES) How should one go about leveraging the rank to benefit our site/business? 3) What would be the best way to utilise the site - redirects? Build out some kind of content and link to main site? Anyhow, hopefully some of you have great experience in this domain in the current Google Panda/Penguin white hat world? Would REALLY appreciate your thoughts!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | love-seo-goodness1 -
Duplicate page content query
Hi forum, For some reason I have recently received a large increase in my Duplicate Page Content issues. Currently it says I have over 7,000 duplicate page content errors! For example it says: Sample URLs with this Duplicate Page Content http://dikelli.com.au/accessories/gowns/news.html http://dikelli.com.au/accessories/news.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sterls
http://dikelli.com.au/gallery/dikelli/gowns/gowns/sale_gowns.html However there are no physical links to any of these page on my site and even when I look at my FTP files (I am using Dreamweaver) these directories and files do not exist. Can anyone please tell me why the SEOMOZ crawl is coming up with these errors and how to solve them?0 -
Front end content optimisation query
One of my sites is installing Strange Loop, a front end content optimisation platform. Does anyone have any advice when dealing with this type of implementation or pitfalls that I need to look out for. Even just a headsup on some reading material would be good. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BenFox0 -
Rankings Dropped
Hello, I wonder if anyone can point us in the right direction. Our main domain name has got a good SEO profile the domain is 12 years old and we have some good reputable links. On the 7th of Jan our website dropped in the rankings from 3rd to 10th for one of our main keywords and from then onwards some of our other keywords have dropped. We have a lot of landing pages that target specific keywords which look like a template page but just with the content changed. Can anyone pin point what could of caused this problem or has anyone experienced this before and knows how to fix it. I personally think we have been hit by the panda. Thanks, Scott
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ScottBaxterWW0